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Illumos Foundation launches OpenIndiana

The Illumos Foundation has announced the launch of OpenIndiana, a new fork, or 'spork' as the developers describe it, based on OpenSolaris. According to OpenIndiana Project lead developer Alasdair Lumsden, future versions of the community driven distribution will be based on the Illumos OpenSolaris derivative, which is based on OS/Net, a consolidation of the core operating system and networking components of OpenSolaris, with all the closed source elements replaced with open source versions.

The OpenIndiana desktop and installer.
OpenIndiana aims to be binary and package compatible with Solaris 11 and Solaris 11 Express and to act as a "free drop in replacement" for OpenSolaris. The developers compare their development model to the way CentOS project is based on the Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) source. OpenIndiana combines the official OpenSolaris source with free, open source software from the community, such as the XNV X Window System, the Sun Freeware Collection (SFW), the Java Desktop System (JDS), the IPS packaging system and the Caiman installer.

Following the announcement event, the first development build of OpenIndiana (oi_147) based on OpenSolaris build 147 was released for testing. The developers consider it to be "highly experimental" and note that, for example, a number of references to OpenSolaris still remain throughout. The team say that they hope to have all of these updated in the next couple of builds. In addition to the known issues, a few things are currently missing, such as xVM Xen Hypervisor (dom0 support) and Linux branded zones. Current dev builds only support the x86 architecture; SPARC support is expected to follow at a later date. Future builds will switch completely to using Illumos "very soon".

OpenIndiana Project lead developer Alasdair Lumsden.
When asked by The H when the first stable release is expected to arrive, Lumsden said that he anticipates that a stable version will be released in the next three to six months. A project roadmap and release schedule have yet to be published.

As with all development releases, use in production environments and on mission critical systems is not advised. Users testing the release are asked to provide feedback and report any bugs that they encounter.